signs of relief

by uzwi

The Gollancz reprints of The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life and Things That Never Happen are up at Amazon UK, with a release date of 8th September 2016. Pre-orders are encouraged. No images available. There was some interesting art & design for the covers, which I saw way back at the end of 2014, but I believe that’s been toned down a little now. Even so, they should look quite grown up. If this is good news to you, you can’t be any more relieved than me. Along with Climbers, these books have a central place in my heart–the idea that they’d never be in print again was gnawing at me a bit.

Very good news. I still have and treasure the gorgeous covers in blue, red and green of Ice Monkey, Course of the Heart and Climbers. As I recall it was the first time your books slipped free of narrow genre classification and got a deserved place in fiction A – Z. Having said that I still have, and love, that edition of Ice Monkey with the Ian Miller illustration framed top and bottom in white.

The trouble with your books being out of print is that you either make do with potentially shabby secondhand copies as gifts or you are forced to lend out your own copies, which, in my experience, rarely come back to you. You find that over time your M John Harrison library gradually shrinks in size. So when you have a sudden hankering to re-read a book you can’t, unless you are willing to wait a week for it to turn up – by which point, you figure, the urge may well have passed – so you don’t order it and instead stare at your book shelves with vague feelings of dissatisfaction, unease and restlessness at the current state of your life. Even more dissatisfyingly, those feelings don’t last anywhere near as long as they do after reading one of your books.

As an unexpected addendum to my earlier comment. A day ago I encountered a small pile of tatty Interzone magazines on the floor of a Hastings bookshop. Acquired a couple for £1 each. December 1996 edition was edited by Nicholas Royle and contained ‘The East’.
Royle’ in his intro speaks of genre and book covers. He writes: “Anyone buying M John Harrison’s The Machine in Shaft Ten and expecting a bunch of spaceship stories would have been disappointed; Similarly, anyone who might enjoy Harrison’s distinctive treatment of the short story form would not have found themselves drawn to his work by the cover illustration. His covers these days are hugely improved and his books are categorised as general fiction, as they should be.”

If you’re after friction, however, productive disappointing is part of the lure of generic publication; you’ve successfully disrupted a conversation which cried for disruption. It can be hard to spark “general fiction” into anything beyond a “Next!”